[Sca-cooks] salmon recipe

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Oct 4, 2008, at 7:40 PM, Johnna Holloway wrote:

> This has puzzled me all day so I looked up the term "mousse".
> Davidson in the The Oxford Companion to Food notes that
> the term was in common use by the 18th century in France and that  
> Menon
> by the middle of the 18th century had numerous recipes for them,  
> including
> frozen ones. I am wondering if it's slightly too early to expect a  
> mousse
> before 1600 but maybe we can find one in the later 17th century in a  
> French source.

I had assumed what we were looking for was something similar to mousse  
in form and substance, but not necessarily an actual mousse.

I think there's a claim out there in the French collective culinary  
unconscious that mousse is connected to mousseline, which in 18th and  
19th century parlance refers to any of several sauces or other dishes  
whose consistency has been lightened with whipped cream, which was  
thought to resemble muslin.

Whether or not this is nonsense I couldn't say, but the idea is out  
there.
>
> OED lists only later19th century quotations for the word mousse in  
> English cookery; they don't make
> a connection with dishes like applemose.

I STR people like Rudolf Grewe drawing a connection between mousse and  
mose/moy/mus (not to mention mush) but he's not writing about English  
recipes, generally.

> One of the recipes that I keep coming across that sounds good to me  
> are these recipes
> for a smoked salmon mousse.


Yep. I get the gut instinct, though, that the oldest dish of minced/ 
pureed cooked fish with something done to lighten the texture that  
we're likely top find is gonna be some kind of pastry filling. Unless  
you consider the steamed fish, chicken or scallops minced with egg  
white in Anthimus.

Adamantius



"Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people's souls,  
when we all ought to worry about our own souls, and other people's  
bellies."
			-- Rabbi Israel Salanter